I see a baby boy: he is in the street, he has been struck and badly hurt by a stone. His sister, scarcely larger than himself, leads him across the gutter, screaming, homeward. Toddling howling mite! His tears hold rage, fear, protest, pain--no thought of death, no questioning of life. No, he is wholly alive: life is not good to him, nor does he love it: fatefully and wholly he accepts it. For he thinks not of death. Life may be anger and agony and hunger, but it is everything.--Why then does life seem marvelous to me, save that death must be near? Mildred...? What if she is death and wooing her, life wooes its end? and this be the reason why in love life seems so marvelous good? O Mildred, if this is death, let death enfold me. If you are death, hurry me to your flame-nothing beside which life--green hills and creatures swarming in the sun--is a gray sleep. You are not death, my love. You are the golden trumpet calling me to life. I see other things. Walking toward Mildred, I see the city. Mildred colors the whole strange story: that I am alive, that I am I, now strange! And being strange, all is real, all is inevitable. The real is mysteriously new! Mildred in everything. She has unfolded and become the world. Yet in this ecstasy of clearness, I cannot even know if she is life--or death! But I do know how this city is a shell: how life floods beyond it: a cracked shell, the city, so that in little eddies life seeps in. My vision seeps in, also. I am in a maze of pictures. Mildred has released me from herself to a bewildering freedom. I can fly where I will, and enter where I want. I see myriad women’s arms, suddenly free and fragile like their hair. Women’s arms wave, like hair, in a great wind. A wind sweeps my maze of images: I see streaming men and children and women. Each is crouched close to another. They do not see how they, are streaming, streaming. They think of themselves as fixed, all else as moving. But I am moving. Something in me is fixed, and something in me is moving!... * * * * * This is a pleasant room, and I am in it. What room? Perhaps I am in my house with Mildred, and I am to have a study generous like this one. Am I in my own future, then? Where am _I_ if this is my own book-lined study? Where is Mildred? Let me look sharp and wait. Someone is there.... The room is high and long. Two windows in one wall let in the budding tree-tops of a square. The other walls rise in dark shelves, open with books. Against the black of the wood, the plaster wall is white.